Hi guys, Firstly please don't view me as a script kiddy, trying to hackz0r's the school computers, I passed that phase a while back I'm trying to do a favour for a family member who's partner tragically committed suicide and we're hoping his files might shed some light on a reason why. Now a few idea's have come to mind, but I don't want to get the house tomorow (that doesn't have internet at the mo) and be left stumped. So my ideas so far; * Log in as the second user account. Enable the hidden and disabled administrator account, and strip the password from the account we're trying to get into. Q: Can a user enable that account, and can that account remove the password from another admin account. * Burn a boot CD, fire up a file browser, and drag em all accross to a flash drive. UBCD or UB4WIN, still reading through to see what has USB support etc. * Run that offline registry passowrd remover majigy, but that says something in it's blurb about not allowing access to user files after. If you were me what would you do?
Hurm, they don't stike me as an especially tech savvy family so with a spot of luck the passowrd will be weak. Might be worth a shot.
what operating system? you could just take the hard drive out and stick it in another computer and view the contents that way.
Thats what made me think of the boot CD. I have a passport drive so I can easily enough transfer all the files off without having to take a screwdriver to anything Stuff like that normally scares PC world shoppers
Thanks guys for all you help so tomorow I'm going armed with; UBCD UBCD4WIN Ophcrack Live CD 250GB WD Passport Thankyou again.
you can use any of the utils on here to change the users password: http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm I think the one I normally use is "ntpasswd". Just burn to cd (or you could even use a floppy) & follow the prompts. (one you've reset the password, windows will want to run scandisk (if running XP), as it detects the change in the filesystem. Don't let it run, otherwise the password will need to be changed from the boot cd again. NB: You'll probably only need the drivers for SCSI controllers in servers etc. I can't quite remember exactly, but I think I've also successfully used EBCD. Good luck.
I personally use ERDCommander 2005 to overwrite a local user's password. I'm not sure what the official licensing status of it is, as Microsoft discontinued it when they bought SysInternals and made the System Centre suite; you can't buy it but you can download it all over the shop.
1. If there is an unlocked Administrator account you can log into that and then remove his password. 2. Bootable CD's; Ophcrack or Konboot 3. Take the harddrive out and attach to PC